Alex & Chloe

A year ago I purchased a necklace from Alex & Chloe.  I blogged about it at the time because I was shocked by the lack of customer service when the piece they sent me was defective.  After five unanswered emails of complaint I gave up and moved on with my life.

To my surprise last week I was contacted by a new customer service manager who apologized profusely.  Evidently the company had outsourced their customer service department, and that third party had been to blame for my issues.

I was really shocked and impressed to see that not only had they decided to fix this problem, but also go back retroactively and try to address past problems.  Sure enough the new customer service manager kept his word, shipped me a replacement for my defective necklace and even included a couple of small gift items too.

It may have been a little late, but the fact that they would decide to handle things that way is just really excellent.  It's one thing to address current or future issues, but quite another to go back and correct mistakes of the past.  So thank you to Alex & Chloe for caring!

Oakley Customer Service

I recently purchased some new shoes from Oakley.com and decided it is time I rant about it on my blog.

I've always liked Oakley as a brand. They have some cool products that are pretty stylish and innovative.

But enough of the preamble. I ordered some shoes, they came, and to my annoyance the special Oakley logo laces were severely damaged on the left shoe. No biggie, I thought. I'll just take a picture of it, email it to Oakley, and they will probably just ship me a replacement set of laces.

Wrong.

I eventually had to call Oakley three times, and email them four times, eventually threatening to reverse payment on the item until they resolved the issue. Sadly it seems they have hired a bunch of young surfer kids to run their customer service department. A bunch of shallow pretty people who are quick to sound concerned, but completely incapable of the responsibility of follow up or actually doing anything. These entitled millennials rule the roost at Oakley customer service, that's for sure.

Two weeks later the best solution they could come up with was to ship me a new pair of shoes, and a shipping label to return the 'old' ones.

I haven't seen this kind of customer service shambles since I lived in England.

It's going to cost Oakley $25 or so to send my new shoes, and $20 more to get the old ones back. Then there's the handling costs, and presumably those millenials don't work for free (or at all it would seem).

Quite why a company would flush their profits down the toilet in this way is quite beyond me. Unless they give me a nice fat voucher to say sorry, I won't be shopping there again. Most of the Oakley products can be purchased cheaper at Amazon.com anyway.

Now that I've made myself sound suitably old by bashing millenials, I'm going to hobble down the stairs, sit on my deck and shake my fist at some young kids. GET OFF MY LAWN!